Beerbohm’s Mum

In response to:

In his omnibus review [NYR, January 25] of books by and about Beerbohm, Pritchett thought that the mother was Baltic German. As a matter of fact Eliza Draper was of Yorkshire and Lancashire stock; and since her father was the son of a solicitor and an ardent bibliophile she presumably was brought up in a cultivated household and was well educated. It is almost inconceivable that she had any “difficulty with English idiom.”

As a deceased wife’s (Constantia) sister her marriage to Julius Beerbohm was celebrated outside the United Kingdom.